A 888: etext transcription

These five extrageneric fragments, shifting between prose and verse, fall outside conventional genre categories; their relations to one another and Dickinson's final intentions toward them remain ambiguous. All or some may be passages destined for incorporation into a single letter or a longer composition, brief, autonomous pensées, or the nuclei of poems. Though separated from one another by broken horizontal lines, the fragments are composed in the same hand and were almost certainly jotted down in the same scene of writing. It may be that Dickinson was trying to create a more permanent record of her fragments by copying a series of unrelated texts onto a single sheet of paper. If so, the record is still an unstable one: variant words and lines occurred to her both during the course of copying and after she completed the transcriptions. Five "+" marks scattered throughout the text identify the points where variant readings may enter. The cross-references between the "principal" text and the variants are not always clear, and, in the case of the text beginning "+Dim is the Heavenly | prospective," several possible readings of Dickinson's lines emerge. The encoding of variants here is tentative.